Winter Snuggles
by BoneyM
Summary: An assignment in Tundratown causes the already-close relationship between Nick and Judy to grow closer. And not just for warmth.
1. Chapter 1

"Why did we have to be the ones to pick up the slack, anyway?" Nick asked, wrapping his arms around his ZPD sweater and shivering violently.

"Nick, we've been over this. Rabbits and foxes deal with the cold better than most mammals, so we were the natural fit." Nick suspected Judy was suffering almost as much as he was, but of course the stubborn bunny refused to show it. She hopped along in her adorable little sweater-vest, her mostly-bare paws fluffier than usual thanks to her thicker winter coat. She had been sensible enough to turn down the heat in her apartment in advance to prepare herself for the posting to Tundra Town, but Nick, being Nick, had decided to enjoy his last days in the milder simulated winter of Downtown by blasting the heat at every opportunity, and his winter coat remained stubbornly absent.

The two were proceeding down the aptly-named Frosty Road, fulfilling their task to maintain appearances and make sure the public knew that the ZPD were still out in force even though a significant fraction of the Tundra Town Precinct were hibernating. Tundra Town was a very different district to Downtown, he knew from experience - people kept to themselves and resented any attempt to pry into their private business. It had taken him months to learn how to weave the strange unwritten rules of the Tundratown social norms, to say nothing of the snowdrifts in the streets. And though he had visited daily as part of the Pawpsicle hustle, he'd never had to suffer through an entire day of the harsh cold. And there were still weeks to come!

Nicholas Piberius Wilde was one unhappy fox, and the only thing that mollified him was that the shift was almost up and they had just arrived back at their car.

"Finally! Crank up the heating, Carrots. I'm a pawpsicle over here."

"You know your winter coat won't grow in if you keep warming yourself up. Hold out a little longer, we're 10-42, we'll drop by the station, grab the paperwork and our bags, switch cars, and head to the apartment. We can warm up and do the paperwork there."

"You sure know how to sweet-talk a guy." Judy shot Nick a fondly exasperated look before turning her attention to the road as she pulled the car out. "So tell me about this apartment anyway."

"Fru-Fru set it up for us. She says it's a place they maintain in case one of their guards needs a place to stay."

Nick gave Judy a long, level look. "It's a mafia safehouse, is what you're saying."

There was a long, thoughtful silence. "Well. Now that you mention it, it probably is. We probably shouldn't be staying there, right? As police officers of the ZPD?"

"Hey, should've thought of that before you became cozy with Mr Big and his family. It's too late to wriggle out now."

"You're probably just saying that because you don't want to look for a new place."

"On this short a notice, the only other option is the sort of motel room with mirrors on the ceiling, bedbugs in the mattress, and stains on the sheets."

Judy scrunched up her adorable little bunny face in distaste. "When you put it like that, I think I can live with a little bit of graft."

"That's the spirit."

* * *

The apartment was tiny. Two beds filled one half of the room, so close together they almost touched, with a kitchette, a small TV, and an armchair filling the other half. An ancient metal heater hummed away next to the front door, struggling to keep the temperature inside the room above freezing, and a second door lead into a tiny ensuite with a sink, a bathtub, and toilet.

Of course, seeing as this was built for Mr Big's employees, everything was scaled for polar bears. For Judy and Nick, the room was practically palatial. The beds could fit six of either of them, the armchair was wider than a sofa, and the TV was bigger than both of them put together. In the bathroom, the sink was the size of a bathtub and the bathtub was the somewhere between a hot tub and a swimming pool. To top things off, Fru-Fru - or more likely, one of her father's employees acting on her orders - had thoughtfully left a stepladder just inside the door, as well as a large pile of freshly-laundered bear-sized bedding.

The two of them gawked at their new home, before the feeling of the snow covering his fur starting to melt spurred Nick to action. He dug through his bag, pulled out a ZPD t-shirt he had 'acquired' from one of his wolf classmates at the police academy and a pair of woolen pants, and threw a quick warning to Judy - "protect your innocent bunny eyes, Hopps" - before starting to strip off his snowdusted uniform.

For her part, Judy just rolled her eyes and strolled over to the minifridge - mini for a polar bear, she could stand upright in it if she removed the shelves - and opened it up, surveying the contents with delight. "She even stocked the fridge for us! If she wasn't happily married I'd be telling you to try to snap her up, Nick. She's an absolute angel." Without looking, she ducked the police shirt that had been thrown at her head.

"Har har. I may like small women, but not that small."

Judy started stripping off her accessories - vest, belt, kneepads, wrist and shinguards - and stacking them neatly on the kitchenette counter. Unlike Nick's standard-issue one-size-fits-nobody uniform, hers was custom-made and fit her perfectly, so after she stripped off the bits and pieces it was surprisingly comfortable to lounge around in. "So how small are we talking? Should I worry for my sisters if I ever drag you to Bunny Barrow?"

"Definitely going to plead the Fifth on that one." Nick finished pulling on his change of clothes and came up behind Judy, pushing his muzzle between her ears to rest on top of her head. She'd stopped pretending that annoyed her months ago. "Not bad. Fruit, microwave meals - the good ones! - and even drinks. Soda, juice, beer... is that blueberry wine? I didn't even know that was a thing!"

Judy turned her eyes upwards, getting an eyeful of fox snout. "Oh, you can make wine out of everything. One of my brothers made carrot wine once. About as alcoholic as light beer, still enough to get a bunch of half-grown bunnies drunk off their tiny fluffy butts. Let me tell you, it is not fun to work the fields with a hangover while trying to hide it from mum and dad."

Nick plucked a beer out of the fridge, winced at the coldness of it, and wrapped it in the enormous quilt he had dragged along from the pile of bedding. He ambled over to the armchair and with a bit of struggle, managed to pull himself onto it, and started to mummify himself in the quilt as he pulled it's length up with him. "Didn't realize that Bunny Burrow was such a den of inquity. And I thought I was the hardened crook of this partnership."

"Obviously, you thought wrong." With an effortless hop she leapt up onto the armchair, drawing a look from Nick through the gaps in his wrapping - jealous? impressed? admiring? - and she plopped herself down next to him. "You just gonna coccoon yourself in there, or is there room for you to share the warmth?" There was a quiet moment, just a hair too long to be casual, before Nick rearranged the quilt so it was more bedding than clothing, and Judy ignored the almost-awkward moment in favour of slipping in. She had intended to just share the quilt, but drawn by the warmth - 'sure, keep telling yourself that Jude' - she found herself tunneling through the bedding until she reached Nick and pressed herself into his side, popping her head out the top of the quilt next to his.

"Hi," said Nick, his voice too casual to be convincing, his smile tinged ever-so-slightly with that prey-in-the-headlights look.

Judy smiled back, hugged herself to Nick for a brief moment -

\- but not so brief that she couldn't feel his muscles working under the skin as he shifted uneasily, even through two layers of clothing, muscles he'd always had a bit of but had been added to and refined and toned by the police academy, leaving him no bigger but denser with lean muscle, muscles that she'd seen face down a charging buck and flip the perp into the ground using the 'soft' martial art techniques she'd taught him because the academy didn't, muscles she'd caught a glimpse of a time or two her 'innocent bunny eyes' had just happened to not redirect themselves in time when he'd been changing around her, and underneath the coarse fur that protected him from the world and the oh so soft undercoat she'd only felt a fleeting handful of times was the well-defined lean musculature of a predator in peak fitness, one that had been honed into her equal -

\- and smiled innocently at him. "Let's see what's on TV."

Nick blinked a few times, then turned his attention to the armrest, where a remote the size of his leg was resting precariously. A few moments later they were watching some cop drama that Nick used to enjoy unironically before he learned actual police procedures, and now enjoyed even more when he and Judy criticized it's inaccuracies together. He fished around in the quilt before he found his beer again, popped the top, took a long gulp, and hesitantly put his arm around Judy. She snuggled tighter into his side, and all was well with the world.

* * *

Nick was buried alive in fuzzy warmth.

Or that's what it seemed like when he woke up. There was a soft warm weight burying him and everything was dark. The only thing he recognized was the softly-snoring lump curled into his side, clinging onto him a double-pawful of his t-shirt. He'd recognize that smell anywhere.

Let's see, they had watched the cop drama, then Antiques Roadshow had come on. Carrots was always fascinated by it, and Nick kept up to date out of habit even though a cop didn't need to know antiques like a hustler did. After that, nothing, so he supposed they must have drifted off about then. Sure enough, when he burrowed his way out of the quilt, with Judy clinging on to him like a baby sloth, he was greeted with the sight of a stoat desperately trying to sell a set of vegetable knives through a muted TV. It must be some time after midnight, then. He was considering burrowing back into the blankets for some more sleep when his stomach rumbled loudly and reminded him that he hadn't had dinner.

Judy's eyes snapped open as a rumble filled the air and some ancient, partially-buried instinct flooded her system with adrenaline. The smell already flooding her nose was instantly familiar, sparking a mix of instinctive terror and familiarity-bred comfort than mixed together in some sort of emotional alchemy to produce a warm, happy thrill that sent a tingle through her fur every time. Let's see, her and Nick had been watching TV and Nick had fallen asleep about when that darling little otter-made weather house was being valued, so she had muted the TV and-

As her memory and her sense of where she was met halfway, she shifted her eyes from the comforting darkness that she now realized must be Nick's t-shirt and looked up, seeing a faint sliver of light through a gap in the blankets, barely illuminating Nick's face which was looking down at her with a warm smile. "Morning, Fluff. Sleep well?"

Judy considered snarking at him, but was too warm and content to do anything more than answer honestly. "I did. What time is it?"

"Infomercials start around midnight, so it's at least then. And I don't know about you, but I am starving." After a couple of failed attempts to leave the warmth of the blankets, the two of them managed to tear themselves free and started investigating the possibilities of the microwavable meals. "Huh, looks like the local specialties instead of the crappy Hungry Maw stuff. Let's see... Carrots, you okay with me microwaving up some fish?"

"As long as I get the microwave first." Judy sorted through the stack of meals and pulled out a package boasting "Tundra Town's Finest Crowberry Pie", with a picture of a reindeer giving a thumbs up. A quick rummage revealed a stack of bear-sized saucers that made for suitable dinner plates, and before long they sat down to their late dinner cross-legged on the ground and side-by-side at the coffee table. Nick's meal, far from the soft, soggy fish-sticks she had expected, was a long, thin yellow steak covered in a rich, dark sauce with a side of rice. Likewise, far from the smell of fish-sticks, or of the smell she had encountered coming off the Tundra Town fish markets, the smell was more... "Blueberry? Seriously?"

"Yep, halibut steak with blueberry and pepper sauce. Had it a couple times back when I was spending a lot of time in Tundra Town. It's not actually the same blueberry your parents grow, this one grows a lot further north. Still good, though." He took a deep whiff of the meal, before plucking a berry out of the sauce and throwing it into his mouth.

"It actually doesn't look, or smell, half bad," she observed, starting to gnaw on the crust of the crowberry pie. It was sweeter and more dessert-y than she expected - back at Bunny Burrow a nice savory fruit pie would often be a main course - but it was still better than a donut dinner, which she'd had a time or two on stakeouts.

"Really? I thought you bunnies were too civilized to go in for the eating of animals." Nick started to dig in to his meal, delicately carving slices of fish off the steak, dipping it in the sauce, and delivering it to his mouth. His eyes closed as he revelled in the taste before going back for more.

Once, Judy would've flinched at that and tried to tiptoe around the subject, but she knew better than to let his banter get to her now. She leaned over, filched Nick's fork and considered the sizable morsel speared on it. "When I was seven, the alfalfa crop failed all through our region. Not that big a deal for my parents or older siblings since our other crops were fine, but little bunnies need a lot of protein, you know. We could have imported something like legumes or bought a bunch of protein supplements, but the cheapest source turned out to be good ol' Zootopian 'Hungry Maw' brand fish-sticks." She started to nibble away at the morsel, the semi-familiar taste of the ersatz blueberry mixing with the unfamiliar but surprisingly palatable taste of halibut steak in her mouth. She continued to speak through the mouthful of fish, "and let me tell you, this tastes a lot better than fish-sticks."

"Huh." Nick watched her for a moment and considered trying to recover his fork, before shrugging a little and starting to peel bite-sized chunks of fish off the steak with his claws. "Surprisingly cosmopolitan of you, Carrots. We'll make a big city girl out of you yet."

Judy rolled her eyes at him, finished off the forkful of fish, and returned to her pie. The two of them finished off their dinners in companionable silence, and before long both of them had their paws and muzzles stained dark blue with berry juices, and they exchanged glances and grinned at each other's appearances.

"Alright, Fluff, go have a bath and clean up your adorable bunny face. If I went first I'll come back to find you neck-deep in paperwork and blue pawprints over all of it."

"And I'm going to come out to find blue pawprints all over the remote," she shot back, but dug through her bag for her towel and a change of clothes anyway.

* * *

Sure enough, Nick was flicking through channels in a doomed attempt to find anything more interesting than vegetable peelers on post-midnight TV, but he had done the dishes beforehand, in the process cleaning the worst of the blueberry juice off his paws. It had been a while since Judy had shut herself away in the bathroom, and if he hadn't heard the bath draining not long ago he'd have started to worry. Finally the door opened and Judy re-entered the room, her winter coat sticking out in every direction and almost concealing the disgruntled look on her face. She was wearing one of Nick's old palm-patterned shirts (she'd stolen it from him in retaliation for some mischief or another ages back, and she'd never gotten around to returning it and he'd never gotten around to asking) and Nick put a great deal of effort into not thinking about whether she was wearing anything underneath it. Instead, he locked eyes with her poofy head, tried to control his expression, and ducked the towel that was thrown at his head when he finally cracked and grinned at the adorably poofiness of her fur. "Would it've killed you to make the beds while I was in there?"

Nick plastered an innocent expression over his face. "It might have. I wouldn't know, I've never successfully made a bed in my life. Why take the chance?" Nick slid off the armchair and, avoiding a playful cuff from Judy, made his way into the bathroom to get clean.

* * *

When Nick emerged wearing his comfortable silk pyjama pants, one bed was immaculately made - no small feat considering the scale - and the other had a pile of blankets heaped atop it, much like his bed in his tiny apartment Downtown. Though it looked like a haphazard mess at first, it was actually a spiral centered on the center of the bed, and he was genuinely impressed that Judy had managed to replicate it so perfectly. Speaking of, Judy was perched on the lip of that central point, nibbling her lip in concentration as her carrot pen worked it's way through the bane of every cop's life: a considerable amount of paperwork.

Nick sighed and followed her example, grabbing the manila folder full of unfilled forms and his pen. It was a nice pen; it clicked satisfyingly when deployed, fit perfectly in his paw in such a way that it minimized (but not eliminated, never eliminated) cramps from overuse, and had his name emblazened on it in fancy lettering, but he had yet to find a way to blackmail someone with it. Sometimes he regretted returning the carrot pen to Judy.

Shaking off his pen envy, he clambered up the ladder Judy had left leaning against his mess of a bed and joined her in the center of the swirl of blankets. She glanced up at his approach, a smile breaking through the concentration for a brief moment, being met with one from him in return, equally as unconscious. He plopped himself down next to her and started working his way through the stack, pretending not to notice that his pace was at most half that of Judy. At least, he did until she worked her way through her own stack, stuck them into her own manila folder, dropped them off the bed, then grabbed the bottom half of Nick's pile from him and started working through them. "Thanks, Hopps."

"No problem."

They continued to work away, only the twin scratchings of their pens and the occassional rustle of paper breaking the silence, until eventually, mercifully, they reached the bottom of their piles. With a shared sigh of relief, they combined the two piles, slipped them into Nick's folder, and dropped it off the bed to land on Judy's, followed by their pens. "That's all the transfer forms dealt with, and since we're just a show of force here in Tundra Town we might get away with just a few sheets a day to report that we have nothing to report. Almost makes the cold worth it." Nick flopped back on the bed with a relieved sigh.

"Why do you keep your bed like this anyway, Nick?" Judy asked, eyeing the odd burrow of blankets. There was a long delay before he answered, and Judy was just about to check whether he'd fallen asleep when he started to answer.

"Back when I was a kid, it was just me and mum. She worked two jobs just to keep food on the table and a roof over our head, and on top of that she spent hours every week looking after the place - she wanted to give me a good upbringing, and in her mind that meant a clean and orderly house. One thing she'd do is make my bed every morning, even though I insisted that I didn't mind whether it was made or not. I had some idea, in my stupid little kid way, that she was always tired, and I wanted to do something to give her less work to do. I tried making the bed myself, but I was never any good at it, and when it came time to go to bed I'd find that she'd remade it - probably taking even longer than if I had left it alone. So one day, I came up with my first con. I messed up my bed like this and told mum I'd seen a picture of a fox den and I wanted to sleep like that, and then it wasn't her son in a messy bed, it was just her son's little foible, and she thought that me curled up at the bottom of the little blanket foxhole was adorable. Eventually I got used to sleeping that way, and I guess I just kept the habit after I moved out of home." Nick propped himself up on his arms to meet Judy's eye, his familiar smirk plastered over a carefully smothered mix of emotions. "And, hey, it means I don't have to make the bed every morning."

The silence between them stretched out until the smirk started to slip from Nick's face, and then he was hit with a double-armful of suddenly clingy bunny. "Nick, that is the sweetest thing I've ever heard from you!" she almost yelled into his chest. Nick returned the hug with a smile, ruffling Judy's ears familiarly as the silence returned. A long moment later, Judy looked up from his chest. "You never talk about your mother..."

Nick's ears flattened, and he looked away. "Another time, Hopps. That's a story for a maudlin rainy afternoon, over a bottle or five of wine and with no work the day after."

Judy managed to recapture Nick's gaze. "I'll hold you to that." She smiled at him, and after a moment Nick returned it faintly. "In the meantime, how about you share this foxhole of yours with me instead? It is way too cold to sleep alone."

A thousand possible responses raced through Nick's head in an instant, each too lewd or aggressive or kinky for the circumstances, and he settled for a slightly choked "Mi casa su casa, you know that." Nick lead Judy into the top of the burrow and lay down atop the pillows scattered inside it, and waited for her to follow suit. After a moment of hesitation she lay herself down in front of him, the top of her head against his chin, and wriggled backwards into his chest. Nick tugged on the blankets surrounding them, narrowing the entrance until the two sides met in the middle and left only a tiny crack of light to show where it was, letting the darkness enfold them and their own body heat to accumulate in the little burrow as Nick wrapped his arms around Judy.

"G'night Nick."

"G'night Judy."

Before long, Judy had drifted off to sleep, her breathing slowing to a gentle rhythm he felt rather than heard. Sleep eluded him, however. He was too busy trying not to think about things. Like how relatively small the safe zone his arms occupied on Judy's body was, his paws interlocked on her small stomach with danger zones above and below. With how even that 'safe zone' felt under his paws, taut with compact but powerful muscles. The tuft of her tail tickling his stomach, and how that being bare indicated that the shirt she was wearing - that *his* shirt she was wearing - had ridden up dangerously. With how wonderfully soft her bare fur must feel with her winter coat grown in. With how her smell had already filled the blanket den, the wonderfully familiar scent of her that had his instincts and conscious mind in rare agreement on something: that this was a creature he wanted to get close to. And just a faint undertone of the berries she had had for dinner.

And with how if he let those thoughts get the better of him, the tangible proof of his wandering mind would be mere inches away from Judy's bunny butt.

Despite his wandering mind, the warmth and comfort and darkness soon caught up to him, and he followed Judy into slumber.


	2. Chapter 2

"I'm marred forever. I'll never be pretty again."

Judy rolled her eyes, dabbing away at Nick's cuts with an iodine-soaked rag. "The paramedic barely took a square inch of fur off you to stitch the bite. Your shirt will cover it, anyway."

"It's the principle of the thing." Nick was lying on one of the bear-sized pillows as Judy tended to his scratches. The two of them had been called in to help with a perimeter for a search warrant, and had spotted the inhabitants of the apartment - a pair of ferrets - shimmying down a drainpipe in an attempt to escape. After they split up, Judy's one had slipped on a patch of ice, slid into a dustbin, and knocked himself out cold. Nick's ferret had proven more slippery, and had lead him on a chase through Tundratown's filthiest alleys before making a wrong turn and cornering himself, at which point he had turned nasty. Nick had managed to pin him down early on, but since cuffing a ferret was an exercise in futility, he'd had to hold down the wriggling, scratching, biting ferret until backup arrived and managed to take over for the bleeding and utterly exhausted fox.

After booking in the ferrets, seeking a bit of medical help for Nick, and filling out the inevitable paperwork, the two of them had been given the rest of the day off, since Nick was obviously dead on his feet. And now Nick was distracting himself from the sting of iodine with alcohol and complaints. Or, as he had said to Judy before chuckling at his own joke and looking pleased with himself, wine and whine. He was drinking it out of a shot glass the size of a coffee mug, which was balanced precariously on his bare chest, and already his muzzle was stained blue.

Judy grabbed the glass, took a swig from it, and started to swab the scratch that it had covered. "We got the bad guys, and you're still in one piece. That's what matters."

Nick tried to recover the glass from her, but she easily dodged his lazy swipes without interrupting her tending. Before long he gave up, and just watched the rabbit work. "I guess you're right. We did good today. And we got on the good side of the Tundratown sergeant, which I thought was impossible if you didn't weigh in at at least half a ton." Before long both Judy and the glass were finished, and Nick looked forlornly down at his fur, with one patch missing and a number of other patches dyed yellow. His mourning was short-lived, however, as the growling of his stomach interrupted.

Judy laughed. "You stay there, hero. I'll get us some food." After pulling a blanket over Nick's bare chest (after one last look) she went on a quick raid on the crisper draw and the bowl on the kitchen counter, producing a bowl full of various fruits. As she returned to Nick, she saw that without conversation and the sting of iodine to keep him awake, his exhaustion was threatening to drag him into slumber, his eyes half-lidded and his breathing even. She smiled fondly down at him for a moment or two, watching him doze, before saying "lift your head."

Nick opened his eyes for a moment to give her a questioning look but obeyed all the same, and Judy sat herself down on the pillow perpendicular to Nick and pulled his head down towards her lap. Nick's eyes widened, but after a moment they found Judy's smiling face and he relaxed again, letting his head sink back into her lap. A moment later, he opened his mouth to accept the grape she dropped into it, chuckling to himself as he chewed. "Feeding me grapes, now. All I need is another one of you fanning me with a palm frond in a skimpy outfit and I'd have seen everything- ouch!" Judy had tweaked his ear with her nails as she threw a grape into her own mouth with her other hand. "Watch the ears, bunny, don't you know I'm wounded?"

"Watch your tongue and your ears should be fine," Judy replied, booping him on the nose scoldingly with a tangerine before peeling away the skin with her buck teeth. They worked their way through the entire bowl of fruit that way, alternating morsels, with Nick's content, sleepy gaze rarely leaving her face. Judy was a little self-conscious at first, but settled down into the comfort of the routine, unconsciously stroking his ears with her spare hand as she fed the two of them. After the fruit was finished and the two of them basked in the comfortable silence, Nick finally broke it by murmuring, "remind me to get wounded more often, if this is how I'd get treated after."

Judy smiled down at Nick. "As long as you agree to pamper me just as well when I'm the one all scratched up."

Nick scoffed in response. "We both know you're too fast to get hurt in the first place and too stubborn to admit to needing a little TLC if you did get hit."

"But you're stubborn enough to give the TLC even if I said I didn't need it."

"That's true." There was a long moment of simple happiness as the two of them smiled at each other. "We make a pretty good team, don't we?"

"The best."

A few moments later Nick had fallen entirely asleep, and Judy waited a few moments longer, continuing to stroke his ears, before she gently slid herself out from under his head. She almost fell over on top of him because her legs had fallen asleep, but not even that could ruin the moment for her.

* * *

Several hours later Judy had cleaned up from lunch, showered, and was now relaxing on the armchair, one eye on the news playing on the TV and one on the battered second-hand paperback she was reading - a charmingly bad pulp spy novel, where the protagonist killed or slept with everything that moved and used everything that didn't move as a prop in one of the first two things. She was drawn from the book by Nick stirring, who hissed when his movements disturbed his injuries, then stiffly dragged himself upright and staggered into the bathroom. A few moments later the toilet flushed and he emerged again and staggered towards the armchair, looking up at Judy sitting above him and plainly considering whether he could scrabble his way atop it. Judy couldn't resist the urge to look smug, and Nick shot her a playful glare before going back to the pillow and then dragging it over to the base of the armchair to sit on. Judy allowed herself a moment of lofty superiority before she let herself drop off the chair, and her butt bounced on the pillow a couple of times before she came to rest next to Nick.

The major stories had finished and it was on to the cruft and drama. The CEO of a firm that specialized in deodorants and scent masking products was unsuccessfully trying to put down rumours that he was a civet with dyed fur and a prosthetic tail instead of a genuine skunk, and had ended up unwisely challenging his detractors to test his smell for themselves, and enough new 'detractors' had appeared from various fetishist groups on social media that getting them all together was a genuine logistical challenge. Now he was stuck arguing that he shouldn't have to foot the bill for renting and subsequently clearing the smell out of a conference hall.

"You know, Nick, that reminds me of something I was meaning to ask you..."

Nick frowned at her, then looked down at himself. "I don't need a shower THAT badly, do I? All I can smell is iodine right now."

"No, nothing like that. It's just that you've always had kind of an obvious smell- not a BAD smell!" she rushed to reassure him, as he gave her an insulted look. "I kind of like it now that I'm used to it, actually. It's just pretty distinct. I thought it was just a rabbit thing, you know, being very aware of the smell of a fox, but I've started getting a lot of questions about what exactly our relationship was from some of the mammals at work, and apparently it's because they can smell you on me."

"Ah," replied Nick thoughtfully. He leaned over to Judy as best he could, wincing, and sniffed at her. "Now that you mention it, you do smell a bit me-ish. Where are the rabbit scent glands, Carrots?"

"Huh? Um, one on the chin, and one, ah, private."

"Hah. Yeah, foxes have a private one too. But we've got other ones all over. Cheeks, hands, feet, tail. Some mammals say they smell like violets, others just say it's musk. Either way, hang around a fox long enough and you start smelling like one too." Nick looked over at Judy, smiling a little at her shocked expression. "We foxes are territorial animals, Hopps. If we really want to claim something we rub our cheeks on it, but we're always marking everything we touch a little bit."

"That's..." Judy mulled the thought over a bit, trying to decide how she felt about that. Nick watched her think for a moment before interrupting her train of thought.

"If you want, there's a bottle of musk mask in my bag. It'll neutralize the smell, let you put something else over it - but make sure you do, because if coming in to work smelling like fox is getting tongues and tails wagging, coming in smelling like musk mask definitely will. Or," and his voice lowered, becoming almost seductive. "You could even the score. Put that bunny chin of yours to work and return the favour. REALLY get them talking."

If Nick was bluffing - and he himself couldn't say for sure whether he had been in that moment - he didn't get a chance to retract it. Learning that her scent had been announcing to the world that she, a rabbit, had been marked by a fox, had started a whirlwind of emotions in her that she couldn't begin to separate and identify, one that only intensified when she considered killing off that familiar, comfortable, Nick-y smell. But when Nick had suggested marking him back - 'chinning' him, as rabbits called it - it had felt RIGHT. With only just enough presence of mind to keep herself from tackling his chest and probably reopening his stitches, she instead stood up, took Nick's head in her arms, looked him in the eye for a moment, then gently but firmly ran her chin along the top of his head, from the point of his nose to the base of his ears.

With the task done, her boldness fled in an instant, leaving behind that maelstrom of emotions, and she returned herself to his side without meeting his eyes again, a little shocked at her own daring. There was a quiet, thoughtful moment between the two of them as Judy blushed hotly, before Nick broke the silence. "Huh. Well. That puts that matter to rest pretty solidly, then." His voice was forcedly casual, but it was too stilted to ring true, displaying his shock to Judy as clearly as if he had stammered it. After a further thoughtful moment, he continued on with artificial smoothness, "so, what have you been telling these tongue-waggers about us when they ask?"

"That we're partners."

"Which we are, of course."

"Great ones."

"Mm." There was a long, thoughtful pause, and Nick decided to press his luck. "But... something else, too, I think."

Judy gathered her courage and tore her gaze away from the nothing she had been staring so determinedly at, and looked up to meet Nick's expression looking down at her. There were a lot of emotions in that look, most of which she couldn't begin to identify, but there was one she had long experience with: the pure, uncomplicated fondness that he almost always looked at her with these days. With that look concentrated on her, any desire to deny Nick's unspoken question melted away in her. "Yes. Something else. I mean, don't ask me exactly what that something else is because I couldn't even begin to tell you what that something is, but... something." She smiled up at Nick, feeling an incredible relief at having put into words, even so vaguely, what it was that had been brewing between the two of them.

"Something." Nick mulled it over for a moment, his smile not wavering for a moment. "Well, I'm glad to be something with you, Hopps."

"Thanks, Nick. I am too."

After another moment of looking into each other's eyes, Judy broke off her gaze and burrowed her face into Nick's side, taking a deep breath of that familiar, comfortable smell of Nick that had taken on a whole new dimension of meaning for her. Nick rubbed a finger along the top of his muzzle and then brought it to his nose, sniffing deeply, testing out the smell of being marked by a rabbit. It was quite gentle by fox standards, but it had a quiet intensity all of it's own, and Nick quickly found himself deciding he liked the smell of Judy having claimed him - though it wasn't an objective judgement by any measure.

* * *

A/N: As far as I know, and corroborated by the finest results two minutes in Google can produce, the scent gland info in this chapter is accurate. It's the anal scent glands that give foxes their musky, almost skunk-ish odor, so in a more civilized world where applying your butthole to things is no longer considered socially acceptable, foxes would likely still smell potent, but less skunky and more like violets, apparently. Rabbits chinning things is also correct, and it's trivially easy to find dozens of insanely adorable videos demonstrating this on Youtube.


	3. Chapter 3

"I can't believe we forgot candles."

"I can't believe YOU forgot candles. Me forgetting them is perfectly believable."

Nick and Judy sat in pitch darkness, the howling wind buffeting the taped-up windows. A mechanical fault in a Sahara Square heater had forced an unscheduled shutdown, and there hadn't been time to do the same for it's counterpart on the Tundratown side of the artificial weather network. So without that heat to counterbalance the system, the weather system spiraled out of control, with temperatures plummeting and gale-force winds expected. A system of safety measures and built-in inertia had given the ZPD and Zootopia Emergency Services time to distribute supplies and instructions for anyone under 50kg to stay indoors until the all-clear was sounded. Which, of course, included Judy and Nick.

The two of them had piled up bottled water and thermal blankets in a corner of the apartment, stacked extra cold packs into the refrigerator, and settled in to wait out the storm, but shortly after sundown the power had gone out. Neither of their phones had been charged because they had unplugged everything from the wall sockets to protect against power surges, and, as it turned out, they had no other source of light. So to avoid wasting the limited power, they had decided against using them as light sources.

So now they sat, side by side and wrapped in a shared blanket on Nick's mess of a bed to ward off the chill, passing back and forth a bottle of wine they had warmed with their combined body heat. The sat in companionable silence for a while, until Judy spoke up. "Well, it's not exactly rainy, but we've got the wine and there's definitely no work tomorrow. Is it alright if I ask about your mother?"

Nick took a while to answer, and Judy felt him shifting in his seat. "There's more wine, right?"

"Five more bottles."

"Well, alright then." He took a swig of the current bottle, weighing his words carefully before starting. "Well... the short version is she deserved a better son than she got. Or at least a son better at hiding what he was really doing for a living. She never did take no for an answer, not when she knew she was in the right. And when it came to whether I should be cozying up to organized crime for a living, she definitely did, and in hindsight, she was right as hell. But I was young and angry and convinced that there was no legal income stream for a fox like me, not just to keep me in Hawaiian shirts and exotic fruits but to keep the roof of the flat I grew up in over her head without her having to work two jobs as well. So when she made some ultimatums, I walked out. For her own good, I told myself. Only contact I had with her for years was sending money every month."

Nick trailed off for a long moment, lost in memory, and Judy reached into the darkness and, after a bit of fumbling, put her paw over his. Nick flinched slightly at the contact, but didn't pull away, instead plowing on with the story. "After my falling out with Mister Big, I still didn't get back in touch with her. It would have meant admitting I'd failed her, that I'd hurt her out of stupid pride and didn't even have anything to show for it. So I kept throwing myself back into business so I could keep sending money to her. Took a lot of stupid risks before I went into business with Finnick. Little guy probably saved my life when we started doing the nice, safe bread-and-butter hustles.

"About a year after me and him went into business, I felt confident enough to get back in touch with mum again. Six years since the last time I'd spoken with her. I dressed up all nice, bought a bunch of flowers, and swaggered back into the shitty dead-end neighborhood. Walked up my street, up to the block of flats I'd lived in, pressed the buzzer of the apartment I'd grown up in. And a nice old beaver couple responded. I thought I'd hit the wrong button at first but a bit of talking later they said that Mrs Wilde had used to live there and they forwarded mail to her new address - after a fire had gutted half the tenement block she'd taken the settlement from a class-action lawsuit against the landlord and moved away. I charmed them into giving me the address easy enough, and it was in some county hours away.

"So I poked around. Asked some questions. Had a couple friends in government pull some records. Turns out mum had done pretty well for herself. Got a few promotions at one of her jobs and was able to quit the other. Ended up getting close to a well-off guy that did business with her firm, they dated for a while then married, moved into the country. For two and a half years she'd been Mrs Pentleton. She and him had been trying to have a baby before they had grown apart. I had almost been an older brother, never realized it. They ended up divorcing amicably, and she agreed to waive alimony in exchange for a property she'd spend most of the marriage developing. By the time I had tracked her down, she was Mrs Wilde again and owner of thirty acres of prime beetle-ranching farmland. And still getting an envelope of money from me every month.

"I guess it was stupid and probably more than a bit selfish to expect her to just stay exactly the same and wait for me to decide to waltz back into her life, but still, it shattered me. I'd built my entire identity around having done what I'd done to provide for my mother, and she had been making more money than me the whole time. And it was my own damn stupid fault for deliberately not having left her with any way to contact me. I couldn't blame it on anyone but myself. Ever since that, I just sort of drifted forward on autopilot doing what I've always done because I couldn't think of what else to do. Up until I met a certain bunny, anyway." In the darkness, Nick's paw turned to take Judy's in his, their fingers intertwining. Judy had no other response, stunned by the story. Unnoticing of her befuddlement, or unable to stop until it was done, Nick pressed on.

"I did end up getting in contact with her again. Things are- were- okay between us, I guess. Strained but civil. We talked about once a month and I pretended I wasn't a crook and she pretended she didn't mind, but with that topic off limits there wasn't much else in my life, so I mostly just listened while she told me years and years of life events I had missed out on.

"Then came graduation from the Academy.

"I hadn't told her about the whole Night Howler thing, or that I was trying to become an officer. At first because I didn't want her to worry, and then because I wanted to surprise her. Then when I heard that I had made it through, I called up mum to tell her and invite her to the ceremony and...

"She didn't believe me.

"It wasn't just shocked disbelief. It was her being unable to accept that her son had it in him to become an officer of the law. She was angry at me for whatever it was I was trying to pull.

"I hung up. Haven't called her since. She hasn't tried to call me, either."

The long lull after Nick's words stretched out, punctuated only by their breathing and the howling of the wind. It took Judy quite some time to realize that a response would be appropriate, and then even longer to stop reeling from the emotional baggage that had just been unpacked before her to come up with an appropriate one. In the end, all she could say was:

"Holy SHIT, Nick."

"I know, right?" Judy could hear the bitter smirk in Nick's words.

Having run out of words, Judy just tucked herself deeper into Nick's side, hugging him tightly. He gently wrapped an arm around her in response.

"You don't have to say anything, Hopps. It's just a big shit sandwich I've made for myself that I've got to munch my way through. All I need from you right now is for you to keep drinking with me."

Accepting the bottle from Nick's paw, Judy did exactly that.

* * *

Things were pretty maudlin for a while after that. Nick cried a bit, Judy cried a lot, and they just cuddled and drank together in the darkness, Judy trying to show with closeness what she couldn't express with words. Eventually, however, Nick pried Judy off his side, sat her up on his chest, and wiped her tears away with the back of his paw. "Okay, that's enough wallowing. Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate you sharing getting mugged in memory lane with me, but if we don't cut it out now I'll be miserable for days." There was a soft, wet noise as Nick licked the tears off his paw, sending indecipherable feelings shooting through Judy.

Judy flopped forward, propping her head up with her elbows on Nick's chest fur, and lay in comfortable silence for a moment. Most of her mind was occupied with trying to decide whether she should admire Nick for his emotional fortitude or be upset with him for trying to avoid having to process the issue, but a rapidly growing segment was too busy exulting in the sheer amount of warmth radiating off the chest below her. She'd shared body warmth with mammals before Nick, of course - winter in Bunny Burrows had almost all the bunny children piling into beds with each other or their parents or older siblings for warmth - but Nick easily outdid all of her previous bedmates in sheer heat output. And, of course, in a number of other areas.

A small, oft-ignored corner of her mind raised a notion that threw the rest of her thoughts into disarray. She wanted to kiss him.

She knew it was bad timing. If she kissed him now, he'd think it was just pity motivating her, and while sympathy was a factor the urge had been building in her for a while. And even if he didn't blame that, he'd probably blame the wine, and if she was honest with herself she probably was just tipsy enough to make questionable decisions.

A solution presented itself, and she embraced it. "Hey, Nick?"

"Yeah, Carrots?"

"You're not allowed to interpret this badly, okay?"

"Interpret what-"

She wriggled up his chest, found his muzzle in the darkness with her paws, pulled it down towards her, and placed a gentle kiss on the end of it. His mouth had been partially open and her aim had been partly off-center, so she had mostly just kissed his upper lip and grazed one of his fangs with her lower lip (sending a thrill of fear and excitement through her on top of what was already there), but as clumsy and poorly-aimed and poorly-timed that it was, it was perfect. She knew it was perfect the second it was done. It was a beautiful, shining moment of perfection on par with her graduation from the Academy.

Nick was silent and still for a long stretch of time, long enough for Judy to wonder whether she'd made a mistake, and then there was a rustle of fur on blankets as Nick's arms begun to move. One circled around her, placing a paw on her back - well, slightly lower down than her back, but that was probably just misaimed from the darkness and even if it wasn't she decided she didn't mind - and the other gently probed the darkness until it found her face. His paw engulfed her cheek and she leaned into it, her eyes closing in bliss. She was almost surprised when his mouth sought out hers in the darkness and they kissed again.

It was incredibly awkward. Neither of them had much experience with kissing, let alone with such a size difference, and the darkness and the alcohol certainly didn't help. But it was still perfect, even when they had to stop because they were giggling so much at their fumbling missteps. Then Judy tried to lean in to resume and went drastically off-course, and her lips had found Nick's left nostril. He snorted in surprise, causing Judy's cheeks to bulge with his breath, and they had both burst out laughing, Judy collapsing onto Nick's chest. And that was perfect, too.

* * *

A/N: A shorter chapter than usual, but it was a nice point to end on. The rest of the night will probably be in the next chapter.

I may have caused frowns or stepped on toes by turning a fluffy little snugglefic into such a drastic expansion of canon by supplying my own answer for one of the biggest unanswered questions of the movie, and if I harshed your buzz I apologize, but after I had started writing the set-up for the blackout, I realized that it was the perfect point for Nick to tell Judy the rest of the story with his mother. And I think it's a good answer for why they'd be out of contact - no tragedy, no villain, just two strong-willed and stubborn people who both think they're right. If you've got a strong opinion one way or the other about who's right and who's wrong here, I'd love to hear it.


	4. Chapter 4

It was later, and they were drunker.

The sleet outside had given away to heavy snow, and the silence had gotten somehow quieter and the darkness darker, and it seemed that the world had shrunk to just the two of them in their cozy, warm blanket burrow. They had nothing to do, nowhere to be, and no concerns. All they had and all they needed was each other.

Judy was stretched out on Nick's bare chest, her fingers running over his muscles, marveling at that which was so well hidden under his fuzzy pelt. He was entertaining himself by tensing and relaxing the muscles her fingers were tracing, and she could feel the raw power in each one as they rippled under his skin. These were the muscles of a predator, she thought wonderingly to herself. A creature that would, in the past, have chased her down and eaten her if given a chance. And even in the modern day there was a variety of products meant to protect creatures like her from him. And now here she was draped over one, completely vulnerable, and she knew for a fact that she couldn't be safer. Even the strong musky smell of fox that she was surrounded by meant warmth and comfort to her now.

Her probing fingers had run down Nick's arm and had reached his paws, and with barely a moment's hesitation she continued on to the pads of his paws. As rabbits lacked them, she was unfamiliar with them, and they held a certain fascination for them. Night-time horror stories told among rabbit kits told that they were to hold their victims in place, but she had done a little research on fox anatomy and knew that they were to support a fox's weight, from back in the quadrupedal past. They were rough, almost as rough as a callous, but underneath they were very soft, almost gel-like. She entertained herself for a moment poking at them, building up her confidence before she moved on to the claws.

She had been worried a bit, and in the past had deliberately avoided thinking about them, but she was just drunk enough and comfortable enough to dive in. And she found she needn't have worried. She had pictured some dramatic reaction she would have to his claws, hyperventilating or rubbing at her cheek or some other such nonsense as she flashed back to her childhood encounter with Gideon, but everything about this moment was so Nick that it was impossible for her to relate it to someone else. These were Nick's claws, how could she ever be concerned about them?

Her fingers ran over his claws, lightly at first. Nick held his paw absolutely still, and she could feel his heartbeat increasing slightly under her. She considered saying something to calm him down a bit, but decided against breaking the silence, and just continued on with confidence, and soon enough she felt some of the tenseness go out of him and his heartbeat slow back to it's drowsy level as she ran his clawpoints over her fingertips. They were blunter than she expected, which made sense - he couldn't retract them, that was a grey fox thing - but they weren't for cutting or slicing like a cat's claws. They were for pinning down his prey.

His prey. She rolled that thought around in her mind for a moment. Well, she was prey. And, in this moment, she could admit that she was his. Did that make her his prey? Well, she thought, blushing at her own boldness, she'd let him pin her down if he asked nicely. The thought burned brightly in her imagination for a moment, before she was distracted with her ongoing investigation of Nick's claws. Carefully testing them she'd found that even if she pressed her paw against it hard, without force and momentum behind it it didn't break the skin or hurt at all. Running her paw back and forth created the most effective scratching sensation she'd ever encountered, even better than rabbit nails. "Mm, Nick, when I shed this coat you're so scratching me all over with these," she murmured sleepily. Nick's only response was to exhale the breath he had been holding, and his muzzle sought out the top of her head to kiss it in affirmation, managing to land a direct hit between her ears that she giggled slightly at. She considered grabbing at his face to explore his teeth, but that would mean leaving his chest - or at least breaking contact with it enough to reach up - and that was a sacrifice she wasn't willing to make.

* * *

It was later, and they were slightly less drunk.

After finishing off the second bottle, they had mutually and silently refused to venture out of their bubble of warmth for more. Time had passed - minutes, hours, days, they neither knew nor cared - and whether they had slept or dozed or just lay their in sleepy bliss was equally unknowable. The only indication of time passing was the almost unnoticeable fade from the fuzzy warmth of alcohol to the fuzzy warmth of fuzz and warmth. That, and another, more pressing indicator, that Judy felt herself hating with every fiber of her being.

She had to pee.

At some point, Nick's paw, released from her examinations, had planted itself on her back. If her using his chest as her mattress didn't nail home the size difference between them, his paw circling her entire lower back certainly did, and while she normally exulted in those differences, right now pushing the paw off her would require a whole master plan of movements - turning around, putting her paws on his, lifting it off her - which would require waking up a little more. Which seemed impossible to her.

So instead, she nudged Nick. The tiny, soft movement was almost entirely absorbed by his fur, and whatever impact got through didn't stir him. She tried headbutting his chest, but when she lifted her head she found that robbed her head of the softness and warmth of his chest, so quickly gave up on that idea and burrowed her face back into his chest fur. This was a disaster. She only had one recourse left before she'd have to abandon the sleepy half-doze she was in and actually start thinking her way through the problem.

"Nick. Nick. Niiiiick."

"Mmm?"

"Getyerpawoffme. Gottapee."

"Mm." There was a long moment while he processed that, and the comforting weight of his paw was lifted off her, and she almost asked him to return it. But she had a mission. With the determination and raw grit that had driven a tiny bunny through the police academy, she gathered up all her willpower and rolled off Nick and onto the bed.

The bed was cold. She could feel warmth radiating from where Nick was lying, but compared to lying on Nick himself, the bed was freezing cold. When she burrowed through the blankets to escape the bed, the blankets seemed to grow colder as she went further from Nick. When she finally found the edge of the blankets and nosed her way through, the outside air hit her like a sledgehammer of coldness, driving the sleepiness from her in an instant. And when she dropped off the bed and her little bunny feet made contact with the carpet, that was the coldest thing of all.

Except it wasn't. Because after the carpet came the tiles of the bathroom. And then the porcelain of the toilet.

Half a minute later, after her business was done and the toilet was flushed, Judy felt like she had survived the worst ordeal of her life. She practically flew out of the bathroom and made possibly the best leap of her life going from the door to the bathroom to the bed, and then burrowed into the blankets in a desperate search for the warmth of Nick's body that felt like a distant, hazy memory. As she burrowed, she could feel the temperature rising as she made her way back to the promised land. And she almost sobbed with relief as a pair of paws reached out and plucked her from the blankets and carried her back to the incredible warmth of Nick's chest, which she swore to herself she would never, ever leave again. She shivered uncontrollably as she wriggled, trying to burrow further into Nick's chest as his paws roamed over her body, rubbing warmth back into her, and before long she was back in bliss. No, she had been in bliss before, and now that she had such stark contrast this was beyond bliss - this was a religious experience. She had found her purpose in life. It was to never, ever leave the endless radiating warmth of this fox's chest. Every time she thought she had been warmed back up to where she was before, every time she felt she had reached the pinnacle of warmth before discomfort would set in, she somehow got warmer and even comfier.

When Nick murmured that he had to pee now too, she almost cried.

* * *

Nick's return to the warmth of the bed had been a whole lot less acrobatic but more dramatic than hers. He scrabbled up the side of the bed in sheer desperation, then tunneled through the blankets like a trained tracker, beelining straight for her. When he reached her, he wrapped his arms around her, clung her to his chest, and curled his entire body around her, shivering violently. Judy just clung to him in return, knowing well the terrible torment he had just suffered and trying to alleviate it with her presence as best she could.

When his shivering had minimized, he finally found his voice. "Carrots?"

"Yeah?"

"We really need to alert the authorities. There appears to be a wormhole to some sort of frozen hell dimension in our bathroom."

"We are the authorities, Nick."

"Oh. Are we alerted?"

"Yes. We are."

"Good."

With any hope of sleep dashed by their encounters with the primordial realm of ice and cold that had once been known as their bathroom, the two of them started planning further excursions out of their bubble of warmth and safety. More wine was required, as were snacks. There was a short but vigorous debate as to who should venture out, and Nick won the argument, with a combination of arguing that he could warm up Judy a lot faster than vice versa, and an oath that he'd bear her children. Judy braced herself for another voyage into the cold, promising herself that if Zootopian medical science made some really surprising advances in surrogacy technology, Nick would regret his promise.

The trip was almost anticlimactic. Having a solid mental map of the room and a short list of objectives, she was able to bound free of the covers, leap across the room, take the wine bottle in one hand, a plastic bag full of snacks that had been left on the counter in the other, and be burrowing back into the blankets before the shock of the cold had fully hit her. She burrowed her way back into Nick's chest fur nevertheless, but only after tucking the wine bottle up against it's side to warm it, ignoring his yelp. After warmth had filled both her and the wine, they popped the cork and started swigging some more, interspersed with feeding each other snacks and scolding each other playfully as they missed in the darkness and started scattering crumbs.

After a while, the last of the chips were munched down and a good third of the wine bottle was gone, and they started on the fruits. A little nipping of fingers escalated into flirtatious sucks, and soon enough no hands were involved at all as they took it in turns to hold a berry in their lips and invite the other to take it, which lead to a lot of kisses and also a lot of inadvertent headbutts and nibbles of chins, noses, and on one occasion an ear, all of which failed to dampen the mood. A little after that, and after a few mouthfuls of wine were shared in the same way, all pretenses were discarded and they found themselves rolling around in bed, making out with each other with strength and passion that was sure to leave bruises in the morning. After they separated to catch their breath, Judy reached out with her paws to take Nick's face in them to be sure that she'd be looking in the general direction of his eyes.

"Hey Nick," Judy half-whispered half-panted, her voice hoarse with need. "Want to do something we'll regret in the morning?"

Nick began to answer with a kiss, then paused as there was a shuffling in the darkness and a faint whine from him. "Officer Hopps, I regret to inform you that I am not equipped to comply."

"Are you reporting you're unarmed on duty, officer?"

"No ma'am, I'm reporting my firearm is malfunctioning. No matter how much I rack the slide, my safety remains jammed in the 'on' position."

Judy dissolved into giggles, though they subsided into a frustrated frown. "Well, I guess that's any friskiness for tonight off the table. Who knows when I'll be rocking this much artificial courage again?"

"Hey, don't forget that academy training. If you're lacking your sidearm, you can still fallback on paw-to-paw combat. Which is where the metaphor breaks down, because I'm actually referring to bunnilingus."

Judy started giggling again, though when the giggles stopped, it definitely wasn't a frown that followed. And Judy began acquainting herself with the final predatory feature that she had missed on her earlier tour - his wide, grinning mouth, and the long, dexterous tongue within.


	5. Chapter 5

Judy's eyes opened, and she immediately regretted it.

Figuring out why took a considerable amount of time. Picking apart the melange of pain and discomfort she was buried in took a great deal of mental fortitude. Eventually, she identified the throbbing sensation as being located in her head region, various clammy sensations over much of her lower body, deeply unpleasant cold nipping at the tip of one ear, and an acute discomfort in the small of her back. Interpreting these sensations and trying to figure out how to stop them took even longer.

She managed to grope in a vaguely upwards direction with a paw - the second one she tried, as the first wasn't responding to her instructions - until she snagged her ear and pulled it against her body, and back inside the covers that she realized she was still draped in. Then she managed to rock her body back and forth a bit until she managed to roll completely over, causing the empty wine bottle she had been lying on to roll away into some distant corner of the blanket cavern she inhabited. Her entire lower half was entirely bare and the fur was completely matted, and on some level she understood that that can of worms could wait. Which left the throbbing. Of course. A hangover.

Her instinctive response when faced with a problem of that magnitude was to hunt for her partner. It wasn't that difficult a hunt, because the hand that had refused to cooperate in recovering her ear had turned out to be grasping the end of a familiar-looking tail. Summoning her strength, she crawled up it's length until she reached an equally familiar butt, then followed it up a torso until she reached the limit of the blankets. Peeking out, she saw a light brighter than anything she'd ever experienced, and could just make out the silhouette of Nick's head sticking out of the covers, his tongue lolling out. Unable to venture out of the warmth of the blankets, she butted at his torso with her head a few times until she got the desired reaction.

Judy saw Nick's eyes flicker open and take in the world, before they slammed shut again and he let out a extended moan that trailed off into a pained whimper. After a long delay while he tallied his own list of woes, his cracked and hoarse voice said, "Hopps, please arrest the sun for me. It's assaulting an officer."

Judy considered rolling her eyes, then decided it would take more effort than she was capable of. Instead, she continued to butt her head against Nick's chest, though it quickly devolved into more of an extended nuzzling as she remembered the fantastically comfortable qualities of that part of him, as she wordlessly tried to communicate her earnest desire for him to fix everything for her.

There was no reaction for what felt like two or three lifetimes, yet her hopes remained undimmed, and when Nick's arm finally lifted and started roaming about the bed, she felt sure he was about to fix everything for her. So when what he produced was the half-full wine-bottle they'd not quite finished off the night before, she took it on faith that it would make everything better, and after managing to sink her teeth into the cork and pull it free, she balanced the bottle on Nick's chest and lapped at the wine that trickled forth. As Nick's paw clumsily but softly found it's way to her head and started stroking her ears, the world almost seemed alright again. And when, an eternity later, Nick's other paw recovered the bottle and Nick guzzled the rest - out of Judy's sight, but she could hear him drinking since she'd buried her head back into his chest fur - she felt almost ready to face the day.

Almost being the operative word. It was almost an hour later when the two of them started to wriggle free of the blankets, the sun having warmed the room up to where the cold was merely mildly unpleasant instead of pure suffering. Judy looked down at her bare lower half, matted with what hazy (but thoroughly pleasant) memory told her was mostly saliva, and then looked to the matching pattern of tangled fur covering Nick's muzzle, and blushed hotly.

"So, about last night-"

"Hopps, I am so sorry. I was completely out of line. I should never have used the word 'bunnilingus'."

Judy snorted, and immediately regretted it as it sent a fresh throb of pain through her head, but a smile spread across her face anyway. "I think you did it wrong, Wilde. I was supposed to regret it in the morning." Nick's answering smile almost made the hangover worth it, and the two of them just sat there smiling at each other in what some thoroughly ignored part of Judy's brain was telling her was a sickeningly twee fashion.

Then reality asserted itself, and Judy took stock of the situation. Apart from the... fluid-related matting, there appeared to be blue stains dotted across both her and Nick's fur from when they'd unwisely tried to 'share' wine while making out, as well as stains from various crushed small fruits dotting Nick's back from when they'd been rolling around. A few minor bruises started to make themselves known, and the bed linens would need to be completely stripped and washed before it was fit to sleep in again, riddled with spilled wine and squashed fruit as it was - and there were still missing wine bottles to recover from the blanket warren, too.

Part of her wanted to just crawl back into that mess of blankets and drag Nick with her and leave all of it for a later Judy to deal with. Then the rest of her decided that it wouldn't hurt anything. So she did exactly that.

* * *

Their second attempt at facing the day went quite better. Without a pounding hangover, and comfortably numbed by the wine they had finished off earlier, the two of them crawled happily out of bed and basked in the afternoon sun streaming in through the window.

After a while, Judy reluctantly peeled herself away from the sunbeam for a long, thorough shower - and an annoyingly necessary post-shower combing of her lower regions - and emerged to find Nick had set up a simple meal (breakfast? lunch?) ready to microwave, the power having been restored some time since last night. He ducked into the shower as the timer started, and he emerged just after the microwave beeped, damp but clean, and they sat down to a meal together - one eaten in silence, but with an entire conversation's worth of shared looks and smiles.

After they ate their fill, Judy pushed the empty tub away from her and smiled up at Nick, gathering her thoughts for the conversation they needed to have. "So, Nick... about last night."

"Mmm?" His expression was... well, what he had clearly been going for was a comforting, accepting smile, but Judy had become familiar enough with Nick's ways to recognize the hint of apprehension that lurked below the surface.

"We skipped... a bunch of steps, in this whole whatever-we-are thing. The kissing was fine - more than fine, it was great! But the, um, other thing... and it's not that I didn't enjoy it-" and Judy was blushing again, she was starting to get sick of blushing - "it's just that every step with you has been great. And I don't want to miss any of them by skipping ahead."

"Ah." Nick's expression was calm and understanding, but again, Judy could see below it, and it was all relief. Sometimes her heart wept over how Nick was, on some level, always bracing for disaster, waiting for life to take everything he had away from him. Though life had been kind to him lately, some habits ran so deep they couldn't be easily expunged. Even after all the snuggling they'd done since last night, he'd been expecting a lets-just-be-friends speech. And she couldn't help but feel a little hurt that he still braced for disaster from her, even though he did so with everything he encountered in life. While Judy was occupied with her thoughts, Nick continued to speak; "so we chalk that up to a sneak peek, and dial things back a bit?"

"If you don't mind?" She folded her ears back in concern. "I mean, I know it's not very... fair. I mean, you did THAT for me, but I didn't do anything for you because, well-"

"I want it on the record here and now that it was the wine. That normally never happens to me."

"I don't doubt it- wait, what do you mean, normally?"

"Maybe I should stop putting things on the record."

Judy eyed Nick's poker face with mostly-playful suspicion, before shrugging it off. "Either way, though, are you sure you don't feel... cheated, or something?"

Nick shrugged and smiled. "It's a relationship, not a company. The books don't have to balance at the close of business each day. And besides-" his gaze became a little distant, and he smiled and smacked his lips a little. "I've got a feeling the memories of last night are going to be plenty to keep me satisfied for quite a while."

Judy blushed again, but after a moment's thought, couldn't stop a proud little smile from covering her face as she thought of the mere memory of her having that much impact on Nick. She leaned forward on her chair, then gave up and stood completely up, and just managed to reach his muzzle, and planted a gentle kiss on his lips. It lacked all the crazy spontaneity of the kisses of the night before, but it was heartfelt and sober and entirely sincere and impossible to misconstrue, and for all that it was perfect.

* * *

A/N: It's okay to take things slow. It's okay to go fast. It's even okay to do both, or to go backwards. You want to go back to holding hands and sneaking kisses after a bit of drunken oral sex? Then by all means, do so. The key is communication - if you don't communicate, you let cultural mores dictate the rules and pace of your relationship, and cultural mores are rarely one-size-fits-all. Customize your relationship to suit you and your partner, and you'll both be a lot happier for it.


	6. Chapter 6

"I told you about mine."

"Yeah, but-"

"But what, Nick?"

"No, it's nothing."

"No, it isn't. What were you going to say? That mine doesn't count? Because I'm some inexperienced practically-a-virgin country bunny?"

Nick opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, before admitting, "okay, yes, I thought something along those lines. But I didn't say it."

Judy opened her mouth to retort, but managed to bite it back just in time. She took a few deep breaths, then laughed at herself ruefully. "What is it Clawhauser always says? If thinking it was a crime, we'd all be guilty?"

Judy had known it was going to be a touchy topic. For Nick, the past largely held pain, and he didn't touch on it often. But she hadn't expected him to clam up so tight when it came to the subject of former lovers, and when she had recounted her own experiences over coffee - some awkward fumblings in school, a couple of relationships after it that never went anywhere - she had expected him, perhaps a bit unfairly in hindsight, to return the favour. And things had gotten ugly quickly as Nick had clammed up and, unable to help herself, she'd started prying.

Nick gave a hesitant smile at her change of attitude. "Look, Judy, I'm not trying to keep secrets. And you have to believe I don't look down on you." He hesitated, and Judy rolled her eyes and made a get-it-over-with motion with her hands, and he added "-except literally. I mean, sure, you've got less life experience than me, but when you've done so much more with what you do have, how is that something I could hold above you?"

"Then if it isn't that, what's the problem?"

Nick leaned back against the kitchen sink, considering his answer. "I've... had relationships go badly. Sometimes because of my own stupid mistakes. I don't want to..."

"Scare me off?"

"Well, not scare you off, so much as give you more reason than you already have to rethink all this." Nick gave a self-deprecating smile. And if he thought that would defuse Judy's anger, he was sorely mistaken.

"Urgh- Nick! You can't constantly be tip-toeing around me worried that any little thing is going to set me off and lead the the downfall of, of us!"

"Judy-" Nick tried to interrupt, but Judy raised a hand to silence him. She took a few deep breaths, getting her temper under control and thinking carefully about what to say next.

"Nick, I get that you've had a hard life. Really, I do. But you really need to stop thinking of me like I might be the next thing in your life that blows up on you." Nick opened his mouth to reply but Judy plowed on once more; "and I know I might be, maybe I'll get shot in the line of duty or get hit by a car crossing the road or whatever, or some stupid paranoid thought that's lurking in the back of your head like that I might decide what I really want to do is spend the rest of my life having baby bunnies and farming root vegetables, but you can't put your girlfriend through this... this emotional risk management. Not and keep her as your girlfriend."

Nick cycled through a number of emotions at Judy's speech, before saying, almost as an aside; "you've never said you were my girlfriend before."

Judy blinked, nonplussed. "I- I guess I haven't. But, I mean, we're a couple now, right?"

"Right." Nick smiled for a moment, before shaking his head slightly and returning to the topic. "So, what, I should just unload all my relationship baggage before you and let you see all the fuck-ups I've made and hope it doesn't convince you that I'm a lost cause?"

"Yes! Because even though I don't know every single little anecdote of your life, I know YOU, Nicholas Wilde! And there is nothing you could tell me about your past that would make me think different of you!"

"Oh really?" Something gleaned in Nick's eye, and Judy had a moment to wonder if she hadn't blundered before she pushed the thought away. "I was dating an arctic fox, one of triplets. I dropped in unannounced at her work and snuck up behind her and gave her a bit of a pinch and squeeze, and it turned out to be the wrong triplet entirely."

"That's- that's a perfectly innocent mistake! It could have happened to anybody!"

"And then I tried to play it off like it was deliberate and I suggested a threesome!" Judy blinked and gave Nick a hard look. "Okay, that part wasn't true. I once got to the third date with a grey fox before I realize they were male! And I was too chicken to say anything so we ended up making out in the back of his car!"

"That's... actually kinda hot."

"It was at first but then he got a boner and I panicked and stopped and told him about the whole misunderstanding. He was actually pretty nice about it, I still have drinks with him sometimes- not the point! Before I freaked out I was planning to have Finnick call him the next day and tell him I had left Zootopia!"

"Nick! That's terrible!"

"Exactly my point, Carrots! You can't handle the accumulated decades of the hot mess that is Nicholas Piberius Wilde's love life! As a teenager, I was a back-up dancer for a K-pop music video and I ended up getting a pawjob from the blue one, who turned out to be actually the pink one wearing the blue one's clothes, and they got into a fight that ended up with one of them losing a tooth!"

"What- seriously?"

"Absolutely serious. For a month Finnick and me experimented with cross-dressing to see if we'd get better results if one or both of us looked like a girl!"

"That's not actually a relationship thing, though. Wait, was it?"

"What- no, neither of us swing that way. Jeez Hopps, mind out of the gutter."

"You brought it up. And Nick, stop. Seriously, if these stories are the worst you got..."

Nick took a deep breath, looking at her, before deliberately looking away and staring at a wall. "Another time-"

"Nick-"

"Last one, I promise. I dated a girl for almost two years, about ten years ago. Was crazy about her. She was about to go into postgraduate studies, and I got it into my head that I was holding her back. But I was too cowardly to actually break up with her. I started acting distant, hoping she'd realize she could do so much better. We started fighting all the time. When we did break up, months later, it was... really bad. Messy. I heard from friends she ended up flunking that semester, went on a sabbatical. Never ended up picking up her studies again, she got a job after she got back instead. Got married a year later to a guy a couple years older, had kids, ended up being a full-time mother." Nick sighed, staring into the distance. "This girl, maybe it's just bias speaking but... she was brilliant. She could've gotten a doctorate, and after that, sky was the limit. Instead stupid Nick Wilde derailed her life and now... well, she seems happy in the pictures I've seen, but..." He trailed off and sighed, looking down at his lap.

There was a long silence as Judy processed this, Nick's earlier reticence and his covering for it with silly anecdotes all making sense. She was shocked at first, even a little outraged, but she refused to let her initial reaction take over. Especially after she got a glimpse of his distraught expression. After a long, quiet think, during which Nick's eyes never left his lap, Judy found her voice and quietly broke the silence. "You ever seen inside the bottom left drawer of my desk back at the Downtown precinct?"

"I... don't think I have. Why?"

"It's about half full of newspaper clippings. From what they call the Nighthowler Riots, now. All caused because some dumb bunny didn't keep her mouth shut at that press conference. And it's not just the stuff that happened then, it's the stuff that's still happening." She closed her eyes and started to recite from memory. "There's a stag still in physical therapy for the shattered leg he got in a brawl with a wolf, who is still on probation for it. One of the burned buildings hasn't had an insurance payout yet because the insurance company and the fire alarm company are suing each other. There's a jaguar officer over in the Rainforest District that was pushing for a promotion to Downtown and was on track to get it, then he got his paw fractured during riot control, was on desk duty for months, which wasn't his strong suit. He didn't make the cut because of it. There's a stoat anti-pred activist that's been in and out of the cells ever since then for dancing on the line between free speech and inciting violence, never had so much as a parking ticket until his windows got smashed and his car overturned in one of the riots. Pred/prey motivated violence rates still haven't gone down to pre-Nighthowler Riot levels." She managed to keep her voice steady during the speech, but a few tears slipped out anyway. She could picture the faces of each of them from the photos on their government files. She opened her eyes to find that Nick had looked up and was staring at her. "So you fucked up. That just means we're both fuck-ups, and it's not just me."

Nick's stare pinned her to her chair for a moment longer, before he abruptly rose to his feet and circled the table towards her, and she barely had time to twist in her chair to face him as he dropped to his knees in front of her - bringing his head level with hers - and almost throwing himself against her, his large, strong arms gripping her in a gentle but firm grip, and after a moment she felt a drop of moisture start to soak through the fur of her shoulder, and she realized that Nick was crying too.

In that moment she wasn't sure whether he was seeking comfort or trying to supply it. She pulled him in closer, her thin arms wrapping around Nick's comparatively broad shoulders. She could feel his heart beating against her chest, and though hers was a lot smaller, she would bet he could feel hers beating too. And just for a moment, they seemed to be beating in sync.

The hopelessly sappy thought completely undermined what was left of her composure and she buried her face in the nape Nick's neck, her arms tightening. The two of them lost track of time as they sat entwined in that awkward position, slowly soaking each other with silent tears as they drew comfort from one another.

Finally, Judy broke the silence. Some part of her had realized that this was an opportunity that likely would not come around again. So she composed herself as best she could, pulled her muzzle from where it was burrowed into Nick's neck fur, and with a voice that only slightly cracked from emotion, said "oh, you foxes. You're so emotional."

* * *

A/N: So far Winter Snuggles has been entirely snuggly, but every relationship has fights and this one has gotten developed enough that it'd be remiss of me to continue portraying it as entirely made of happy snuggles. Don't worry, this won't be the new norm, it'll be back to coziness next chapter.

Any given couple will always, eventually, disagree about something. That's pretty much a truism, right? So when you consider that a fight is, when you get right down to it, an emotionally charged disagreement, the fact emerges that fights will always happen, no matter how good a relationship. Whether a fight damages a relationship, or the relationship emerges unscathed on the other side, depends on - you guessed it - communication. If you can get to the core of a disagreement - peel back the vitriol and anger until just the point where your opinions diverge - then emotionally healthy people will be able to let the emotions dissipate harmlessly and address the point.

Of course, if you haven't managed to find one of these theoretically possible but practically non-existent 'emotionally healthy people' to date, you're going to have to deal with the messiness of lingering emotions. There's no real pithy way to explain how to do that! Just try to understand their feelings, and wrap your mind around the concept that no matter the source of a feeling - whether it's unfounded or silly or baseless or whatever - it doesn't stop the feeling from being real and potent.

Truth be told, this fight is actually pretty cheat-y of me - there's at least three point where if Judy didn't stop and cool down a little, it would have devolved into a full-on shouting argument, and similar for Nick. In my defence, having hundreds of siblings and a passion for law enforcement could very well leave someone with a finely-honed suite of conflict deescalation habits.

When did these author's notes become a soapbox for me to lecture about healthy relationships? I don't know! God knows that's the blind leading the blind. But just because I don't take my own advice doesn't mean you shouldn't, either.

On a less soapbox-y note, these chapters have been in Judy's head a lot lately. I wouldn't have expected that, but in the more recent chapters it's been a lot more interesting in the head of the less experienced partner. I'll probably do something in Nick's head before long.

Oh, and yes, rabbits and foxes have similar heartrates. I checked. I don't know why - if artistic license can cover anything, it could cover that - but I did.


	7. Chapter 7

The alarm went off. Two groans responded.

The two former sleepers wriggled in the general direction of the hated sound, trying to get close enough to disable it without breaking their embrace, before Judy finally gave a final groan and dived at the alarm, flailing at the buttons until she hit one that ended the terrible noise. Silence descended once more, but it was too late. They were both awake.

Judy had come to a realization about herself in this posting. When sleeping alone, in nicely temperate weather, she was able to bound out of bed and meet the day the second the alarm went off. But one or both of the endless chill of Tundratown and her newfound bedmate had given sleep a new and powerful hold over her. Being wrenched from it's sweet embrace each morning was horribly traumatic, no matter how many times she suffered through it.

She stumbled towards the kitchenette and fumbled at the kettle, sighing with relief at discovering that there was water in it, then managed to hit the switch to turn it on and stood there, staring at the wall next to it with the patience of someone unable to think. There was a thump behind her as Nick finally managed to escape from the bed, and a moment later he had slouched up behind her, enveloping her in a big, warm hug, his chin resting on the top of her head. She leaned back into it and lost herself in the moment, momentarily comfortable enough that she could almost slip off to sleep again... but then the kettle started to whistle, and once more she was forced to tear herself away from Nick's embrace.

Two mugs. Two spoonfuls of instant coffee in Nick's larger mug, one in hers. Two spoonfuls of sugar in Nick's, none in hers. Pour water. Stir. Top up with milk - almond for her, soy for Nick. The familiar ritual did as much to wake her up as the coffee would, she often suspected. She went to hand Nick his mug, noted his closed eyes, and guided it into his paws, which grasped it reflexively. By the time she had turned back to her own mug, muscle memory had prompted Nick to lift the mug to his lips, and he shamelessly slurped at it. Judy rolled her eyes and took a daintier sip, relaxing as she felt the warmth of the coffee radiate through her. Suddenly facing the day seemed almost possible.

Soon enough, coffee was finished, and the two went to their respective clothing piles - Nick a jumbled mess he was somehow able to keep track of, Judy a neatly-folded pile. They got changed with only a little side-eyeing of each other's bare bodies, Judy having a thoroughly miserable time waiting for her body heat to warm up the material of her bodysuit and Nick having the usual trouble sorting out his tie before Judy took mercy on him and undid and retied it for him, her nimble bunny fingers having a much easier time with the knot. They strapped on belts, grabbed phones, and started to head for the door, before Nick halted, staring at his phone.

"Judy?"

"Yeah?"

"It's our RDO today."

"What?"

"Yeah, three on, one off. We were off last on Monday. It's Friday now."

Judy closed her eyes and counted backwards. He was right. It was their day off.

Judy felt like crying.

* * *

Stripping off their uniforms again took much less time than donning them in the first place had, and with the chill of the room striking her Judy didn't bother to grab her nightshirt to throw on over her panties before following Nick as he burrowed back into the bedcovers, only slightly self-conscious about her near-nudity.

Tragically, the heat had been leeched out of the blankets in their absence, and the sheets aroud her were uncomfortably chilly. She sped up and quickly reached the core of the blanket burrow where Nick was waiting, and she tried not to think about his night vision as she threw herself into his arms, her discomfort fleeing in an instant as Nick's arms and warmth and smell surrounded her. She'd resented her relative smallness quite often in the past few years, but in moments like this it all seemed more than worth it. For once, she felt sorry for Nick for being larger than her. Her entire world had become warmth in an instant, but he had to wait for the blankets to warm back up, the poor dear. In an effort to show her gratitude, she snuggled even closer into him.

Now that the delightful shock of warmth had worn off, she began to notice how different she felt. Without a nightshirt covering her to around mid-thigh, almost her entire front half was in direct contact with Nick's wonderfully soft and warm fur, plunging her into almost hedonistic levels of comfort. The sensation of his fur on hers sent luxurious shivers through her as she wriggled against him in delight, and judging from how Nick's paws were roaming softly over her bare back, he was enjoying the extra level of closeness too. Modesty, be damned, she thought - she was never wearing a nightshirt again, not if it was keeping her from this luxurious feeling.

She lay there for an indeterminate amount of time, the caffeine in her system all that kept her from the precipice of sleep. She drew idle patterns in Nick's fur with her nails, and for a time he did the same on her back with his claws, before his movements stopped and his breath fell into the deep, steady breaths she'd gotten to know so well in recent nights.

Maybe she'd fall asleep, despite the caffeine. Maybe she'd just lie there in quiet, peaceful bliss until Nick woke again. Maybe she'd wriggle temporarily free of Nick's embrace to fetch her phone and return to message her siblings from her refuge of warmth and comfort to entertain herself.

Presented with that selection of equally palatable options, Judy honestly could not remember ever feeling more content than she did in that moment.

* * *

A/N: I know this is significantly shorter than the other chapters, but I was working on what was going to be the seventh chapter, and then I was considering making a cup of coffee and next thing I know I had opened up another document and written all of the above. Consider this a bonus while I work on the next chapter, which should be up in the next few days or so.

One way of reading Judy's newfound infatuation with her time off is as a lessening of her appreciation for policework. That's not actually the case, it's just a side-effect of this story focusing almost entirely on her off-hours. She isn't appreciating being a police officer any less, she's just enjoying her time off more than she used to. Cultivating a healthy work-life balance is important for long-term mental health, after all.


	8. Chapter 8

Judy and Nick had finished their work day early, having brought in a couple of suspects and the dispatcher decided to send them off-shift since if they headed out again their shift would be done by the time they arrived on station. So they had decided - Judy enthusiastically, Nick with feigned distaste, in a byplay that had become a comfortable routine between the two of them ever since Nick had gotten in shape for the Academy - to visit the precinct's small and surprisingly neglected gym. As it turned out, most of the local officers took pride in using the free weights in the open courtyard instead, leaving the gym for visiting officers that weren't so comfortable with the cold.

They had warmed up on the treadmills, then spent some time lifting weights - Nick sticking with hand weights because Judy couldn't safely spot him with the larger ones - and then, inevitably, ended up where the two of them had spent quite a bit of time recently - the crash mats.

ZPD rules of engagement gave a fair amount of leeway to officers dealing with violent mammals larger than they were, and as Judy had demonstrated back at the Academy, she had found ways to make speed and momentum make up for a relative lack of raw strength. But Judy wasn't happy with that, and kept trying to push the limits on the size of mammal she could successfully grapple and therefore arrest without relying on physical damage. And now, apparently, she was up to foxes. And for the fourth time in as many minutes, Nick found himself face-down on the crash mat with Judy putting just enough pressure on one of his joints to communicate that continuing to resist would be a bad idea.

Nick had mixed feelings about continuing to resist. On one paw, he wasn't averse to Judy clambering all over him if she was so inclined, so resisting her efforts to do so seemed a bit of a waste. But on the other, he was worried that one day she'd go for a grapple with a mammal she really should have given a good kicking to instead, and end up hurt - or worse - because of it. So when they faced off for the fifth time that day, both panting softly, Nick resolved that this time, he'd show Judy a thing or two.

Then he resolved to do it the sixth time, because while he had been resolving Judy had grabbed an arm, swept a leg, and ended up perched on top of him with one of his joints at her mercy once more.

* * *

It was actually the eighth time when Nick's resolution got anywhere - he could have pushed it earlier, but he wanted to be careful to make his point without involving teeth or claws. Judy had either become overconfident or had decided to find a joint of Nick's she hadn't abused yet, and apparently not aware that Nick's nose kept him constantly informed of her exact position, circled around him and stayed still a moment too long while sizing him up from behind.

With natural flexibility he rarely displayed, he turned and pounced in a single motion, his paws outstretched. Despite hesitating for a fraction of a second Judy managed to sidestep out of the way, right into the path of Nick's lower half which had twisted in the air to bring his back paws to bear. Though they lacked the agility of his forepaws, they were sufficient to knock her off balance while his front half arrested his lunge and sent him back towards Judy, almost bending double. In an instant she was pinned down, his paws on her shoulders and his toothy grin in her face. He had intended to say something to rub it in, but in the moment, words failed him.

Judy's expression was shocked and slightly impressed through her slight panting, complimented by her rapidly twitching nose as she wriggled slightly and found that she was thoroughly pinned. The smell rising from her was one he rarely got a whiff of - very Hopps-ish, but stronger than usual and with an almost exotic spicy tinge to it. With a husky growl to his voice, he murmured "gotcha" and leaned in, nibbling at the nape of her neck playfully.

"Nick!" she giggled in feigned outrage, and her paws rose to push at his face. And as one of them brushed against his nose, that smell he had smelled earlier was flooding his nostrils with it's mix of familiar Judy-ness and the new and unfamiliar spiciness, and he stopped the nibbling to bury his nose further in her neck, inhaling deeply. Judy gasped and squirmed, and Nick's paws clenched slightly at the intensity of the moment, his claws pressing slightly against Judy's shoulders through her loose shirt, and her paws were on his, but not pushing them away, and she was pushing her chin against his probing muzzle, her eyes closed and her breath panting and her nose twitching in a way that was absolutely enthralling. The buried part of him that would have exulted in the sensation of a helpless rabbit pinned beneath him had been completely subsumed by the larger part of him that was fascinated by Judy in particular, so the conflicted feeling that the cynical side of him had been expecting never surfaced, allowing him to be fully absorbed by the moment.

He knew for a fact that he wasn't paying enough attention to the pin. If Judy was so inclined she could have taken advantage of his distraction to reverse it and put him in yet another jointlock. Instead, she was allowing herself to lie completely vulnerable below him while his muzzle pressed against her bare throat. He pressed his claws a little harder into her shoulder and she gasped and arched her back, her paws grasping his. Without opening her eyes she probed at his muzzle with her twitching nose until she found a corner of his mouth and started peppering it with light kisses, and a moment later her paws shifted to his muzzle to lift it from the nape of her neck, bringing the entirety of his mouth within striking distance of hers, and as a side-effect rubbing the bunny sweat of her paws over his lips. He had thought it's presence to be powerful before, but now it was all-consuming, this new yet familiar taste of salt and spice and Judy. It sent electricity through his entire body, at once relaxing him and exciting him, a contradictory and heady mix of emotions flowing through him and obliterating all rational thought.

He wanted to bury his nose in those paws but with them holding his muzzle, getting to them would require more forward planning than he was capable of at that moment. Then Judy started pressing hard, insistent kisses against the end of his muzzle and he forgot about everything else, and when his lips parted to pant out a breath her small, soft bunny tongue darted inside and explored as best it could inside Nick's much larger mouth. Before long it encountered Nick's much larger, rougher, stronger tongue and roamed over it, before Judy broke the kiss in favour of breathing, gasping in air in gulps. Nick remained dumbfounded for a moment, and just as he was getting his thoughts back in order, Judy finally exploited his lack of attention to reverse the pin, flip him onto his back, and plop herself down atop him. But instead of targeting one of his joints, she went right back for his muzzle, grabbing it between her paws and running the bottom of her chin along the top of his nose, her eyes half-closed in bliss. But with that task done, her eyes opened, and the small part of Nick's mind still capable of conscious thought recognized a mischievous spark in them.

She took one of her paws off her muzzle to look at it thoughtfully for a moment, then gave it an experimental sniff. She held out the damp paw just out of reach of Nick's muzzle, and after a moment a single drop of sweat dropped off of it and onto the end of his nose. The smell flooded his entire world. Without conscious thought his tongue flicked out and licked his nose clean, and the taste was just as intoxicating. Momentarily sated, he turned what little of his attention that wasn't focused on the sensation back to Judy, who was watching with rapt attention as her scent and taste dominated the fox beneath her. Their eyes met, and Nick managed to pant out, "you taste fantastic."

Judy smiled down at him, and leaned down to kiss him once more and reply "you taste pretty good yourself." She planted her paws on Nick's shoulders and leaned in to bury her muzzle in Nick's neck in an imitation of his pose earlier and inhaled deeply. "And this smell... every time I smell it I just feel warm and happy and safe."

Nick's arms circled around Judy and clutched her even tighter to his chest. "How are you so perfect?" Judy made an amused noise into his neck as she snuggled deeper. "I don't deserve you- ow!" Nick jerked his neck away from Judy, who had just nipped sharply at his neck. "You bit me!"

"And I'll keep biting you every time you put yourself down like that, Nick." She pulled her face from his neck and looked him in the eyes, her little bunny face marred by a disgruntled expression and her teeth bared in what was supposed to be a threatening manner.

"You know, you're just proving my point-" Judy's threatening scowl deepened, and Nick laughed and surrendered. "Alright, alright. You win, you savage little bunny."

"Good." In an instant Judy melted back into Nick's embrace, burying her muzzle in the top of Nick's chest that his shirt left uncovered. "Being mad at you cuts into my snuggle time." Her voice was muffled by his fur, and her voice sent vibrations through his chest that tickled strangely.

Well, that tears it, Nick thought to himself. There was no doubting it any more. He was in love with a bunny.

* * *

A/N: This chapter was a tricky one to write. Describing motions - especially of two characters interacting in close proximity like this - is a tough mechanical challenge for me to write with two humans, let alone a pair of mismatched critters like this. And then things got a little bit hot and heavy and out of my control, and at one point I was seriously considering upping the rating on this story to a hard M and letting these two go nuts on each other. I eventually found a way to calm things down without, I hope, making it seem abrupt or blue-ball-ish - I hate the will-they-won't-they thing myself, so I'm trying to keep this firmly in the they-will category, but also with them lingering at all the points leading up to it.

Now for the Critter Facts Corner: Rabbits sweat through their paws! Well, possibly. Some sources say yes, some say no. I went with yes so I could work it into the scentplay scenario. Rabbits also cool down through their ears - lots of blood vessels and a high surface area is great at radiating heat - and both foxes and rabbits pant to cool down.


	9. Chapter 9

Judy wasn't sure what she had expected when she had driven all the way out to Mrs Wilde's ranch, but it sure hadn't been this. She had knocked at the door, been looked up and down by the almost imperious vixen that had answered, and after she introduced herself she had had her badge demanded of her, then been left to wait after the fox had noted down the number and called the ZPD non-emergency line. A short time later, she had been invited to join the fox on the veranda.

Mrs Wilde was the very image of a country vixen, her slightly greying fur worn as proudly as the sensible flannel blouse and faded jeans. Only the phone holster on her belt containing the latest in consumer electronics gave any indication of her big city roots.

She offered Judy her choice of beer or lemonade, and being off-duty and knowing how country folk - even ones not born to it - thought, accepted the beer, which turned out to be unlabeled and home-bottled. They sat in tense silence for a long moment as they looked over the acres of greenhouses, shadehouses, and sheds from the raised veranda. Finally, Mrs Wilde broke the silence.

"I don't know how well rabbits recognize these things, but you are positively covered in the smell of my son, and you didn't look like the bearer of bad news. So the only question was whether you were literally, or only figuratively, his partner in crime. And now I see I've wronged Nicky terribly." Her voice was level, but in a way that highlighted the grief welling up behind the stoic facade. "Does Nick know you're here?"

"Yes."

"Good. I'd have thrown you off my property if you'd come behind his back." The vixen's gaze pinned her to her chair, scrutinizing every inch of her. "Hopps. Of the Bunny Burrow Hoppses?"

"Uh- yes. My parents are Stu and Bonnie."

"Can't say I know them, but I've bought feed from Hoppses in the past. Never been given reason to regret doing business with them. Though, of course, not every apple grows close to the tree." Her gaze narrowed. "What makes you think you're good enough for my son?"

Judy had, out of shock and politeness, let herself be steamrolled by Mrs Wilde, but that was a bit too far. "With respect, Mrs Wilde, that's for Nick to decide, not you."

To Judy's surprise, Mrs Wilde smiled in response. "Good answer. He needs someone with a bit of steel in them. Wouldn't have expected a bunny, but if I could predict my son our lives would have turned out very differently." She sighed and sat back in her chair, her eyes finally leaving Judy to roam over her property. "He always was strong-willed, and clever, and stubborn. If he applied it to something decent... although I suppose he has, now. The young man that answered the phone at ZPD seemed almost smitten with Nicky, with all the nice things he had to say about him. I suppose I have you to thank for that. Tell me, how is it you managed to drag my boy to respectability?"

Judy mulled over her answer for a moment, sipping politely at her beer. "Did you hear about the Nighthowler riots?"

"Of course."

"I was... one of the investigators, back when it was a missing mammals case. Nick was the last known contact of one of them, and helped me track them down, all the way to that abandoned hospital the Mayor was keeping them in." She chose her words with care, trying to sidestep the uncomfortable memory in the middle of it all. "Then, later, he helped me uncover Bellwether's connection to it all. We found her drug lab together, but we were caught by Bellwether's accomplices. I wouldn't have gotten away if it wasn't for Nick. I told him he'd make a good officer, and after Bellwether was jailed he went to the Academy. We've been partners ever since he graduated."

"Partners, as in-"

"Police partners. The other one is... much newer."

"So it was entirely platonic when he went to the Academy?" Her gaze was back on Judy as she nodded, still evaluating but less harshly, now. "I'm impressed. I thought it was a case of feminine wiles pulling my Nicky onto the straight and narrow, but..." She sighed. "You managed what I couldn't." Judy didn't know how to respond to that, so she took another sip of her beer. Mrs Wilde stared out over her property, her eyes distant. "Me and Nicky... we were always too similar to each other. Both convinced we knew best. I still think I did, though no doubt he thinks the same. The mammals he got involved with back then!" Mrs Wilde shook her head, and Judy bit her lip. Mrs Wilde was undoubtedly referring to Mr Big's organisation, which she was even closer to than Nick ever was. She doubted mentioning that would go over well. "He cleaned up his act a bit later on, but it was still no respectable way to make a living. I tried and tried to get him to find a respectable way to make a living, but all I ever managed was to drive a wedge between the two of us. He had such a chip on his shoulder... ever since that damned cub scout meet. If I was any less a vixen of principal, terrible things would have happened to those children, and to the scout leader that cultivated those little monsters." She sighed, and smiled wryly at Judy. "Please forgive me, dear. I haven't had somebody to vent to about these matters in quite some time."

* * *

The two of them spoke for some time, as Judy filled Mrs Wilde in on what had been going on in Nick's life recently and Mrs Wilde told Judy stories about Nick as a kit. Mrs Wilde warmed up to her over time, but remained slightly distant, though Judy couldn't tell if that was just how Mrs Wilde was or not. A couple of hours later they weren't exactly chatting like old friends, but they were talking more comfortably and had shared a few laughs and a few drinks, though Judy had switched to lemonade after the first beer since she still had to drive back. Eventually she had to make her excuses and leave if she was going to get back to Zootopia at a reasonable hour.

On her way back, Judy called Nick on the hands-free unit in the unmarked police car.

"So, how'd it go?"

"I didn't even have to say anything. As soon as I introduced myself, she checked my credentials and then she understood everything."

"She's pretty sharp like that. Most of the time, anyway." There was silence for a moment. "So, how is she?"

"She seemed good. Very, um. Formidable."

"That's the polite way of saying 'scary', Carrots. And you're right, she can be."

"She gave us an open invitation to visit, if you'd like to have company while you see her again..."

Nick took a while to respond. "I think I'd like that. Thanks. So, did you get any idea of how she's doing financially?"

Judy smiled. "She seemed to be doing well. I don't know much about bug farming but there were a lot of buildings in good condition, and those would fall apart pretty quick if they weren't being used and maintained."

Nick sighed. "I'm glad. Even if her financial success made a mockery of my career choices, it's good she's able to get by comfortably now."

"Nick-" Judy begun, warningly.

"Hey, if you can't mock your past self, you've stopped growing as a person, that's what I say." Judy thought back to the person she was when she first joined the ZPD, and had to concede the point.

"Anyway, I'll be home in about an hour. Would you like me to pick up something for dinner?"

"Ooh, you'd be coming through the Rainforest District, right? Can you swing by the Canal District and pick up some prawn laksa from that Melesian place?"

"Sure thing."

"Oh, and Carrots?"

"Yeah?"

"I like that. 'Home'."

Judy blushed, and smiled.

* * *

A/N: What does this make, three chapters in three days? Crazy. Chapter eight was at my normal pace, but seven and now nine both just sort of happened. Please don't expect this sort of pace to continue, I've got no way of knowing whether the next chapter will take substantial effort or whether it'll just sort of fall out of the keyboard when I sit down to write.

Anyway, Winter Snuggles was a good name when it was just exactly that, but I'm running a real risk of having an actual plot and character development in this, so it doesn't seem quite so fitting any more and I'm considering a change. But at the same time I'm hesitant to throw two months of name recognition away. What do you guys think? Any ideas for a better title?

Or maybe I'll just leave the name change for when I split new chapters into a sequel to have them under an M rating, for when these two finally break loose of my control and start lewding each other uncontrollably.


	10. Chapter 10

Notification:

I'm continuing Winter Snuggles in a separate story to up the rating to an M, because things were starting to go beyond the T rating. You can find the next story from my profile.


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